We end 2025 and begin 2026 amidst crisis and loss. Our theme for this volume, “Disconnect,” was chosen in early 2025, but feels increasingly prescient. Arts organisations are being robbed of funding. Universities are cutting subjects and contact hours, replacing face-to-face interaction with YouTube lectures and optional Zoom tutorials. Corporations and institutions are buying into generative AI hype. Our algorithms are increasingly siloing us from dissenting opinions. And in Palestine, a horrific genocide continues, mediated by a mainstream media that insists any criticism of Israel’s wholesale slaughter equates to anti-Semitism.
These are not isolated aspects of contemporary life. They are deeply intertwined, a direct result of unchecked capitalism, systematic oppression, and rampant anti-intellectualism. Universities have lost their social license, prioritising enrolments over education, while tech companies try desperately to convince anyone with cash that generative AI is a boon to productivity, even as those very same companies face billion-dollar losses. Meanwhile, the decimation of the Palestinian people is unquestionably being driven by extractive settler colonialism. We are being herded to a frictionless
existence, all comfort and convenience, at the cost only of our autonomy, our creativity, our critical thinking skills, our compassion.
In this sixth volume of Sūdō Journal, we hope you find, as we did, both solace and a call to action; connection in a time of division; something worth striving for.
Image: “disconnect” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Charley Lhasa